That's quite a jump. Were there any intermediate steps?(job wasn't exactly related to development). Then I got a full-time employment related to development in another OS (illumos)
That's quite a jump. Were there any intermediate steps?(job wasn't exactly related to development). Then I got a full-time employment related to development in another OS (illumos)
Well, I didn't do any development at work, so I had a lot of free time to do it as a hobbyThat's quite a jump. Were there any intermediate steps?
FreeBSD on a personal desktop/laptop, but other than that not really.Is FreeBSD the only operating system you use?
I'd be interested to learn a bit more about that. Would you mind if we take the conversation to PMs? (Or some other communication platform.)Well, I didn't do any development at work, so I had a lot of free time to do it as a hobby
Very interesting, thanks for the honest answer! But what exactly is the reason for using a different operating system? I'll just point out a few cases, and you can write "this" if any case is yours:Not really "forced", I choose to do the job. But yes. I'm going to say, it's 99% of the professional work I do nowadays.
No. As much as I would like to, it would honestly kill my income. No income, no nice place to live. No money to buy cool stuff to run FreeBSD on.
I'm a contractor. I work for a company that specializes in "UNIX" engineers. I get send to different companies, to do projects or temporarily fill an employment gap. I get to go to all sorts of different companies, small, large and everything in between. I've done quite a bit of Sun Solaris but most companies nowadays have all mostly switched to Linux. Besides the typical Microsoft Windows office type environment (workstations, file/print servers, active directory, outlook/exchange, etc) of course. It's rarely a 100% Linux environment, it's often a 4 to 1 ratio (for every 4 MS Windows servers, there's 1 Linux server). I'm currently contracted to run and maintain around 800+ Linux servers. I've set up and wrote about 90% of the puppet code that keeps everything in check.But what exactly is the reason for using a different operating system?
It's difficult to describe what I do, but systems engineer probably covers it best. I build systems or entire farms of servers to do whatever the client wants it to do. Back in the early days I spend a lot of time in a datacenter installing stuff. Things moved progressively towards "devops", or infrastructure-as-code, so I rarely actually physically touch a server now.1) You develop complex programs that run on a specific OS (for example, a specific Linux distribution with a specific version and software environment). And therefore, it is much easier to develop on this distribution right from the start in order to avoid errors, confusion and inconvenience when porting code from FreeBSD to this target Linux distribution.
I use whatever that client provides. Most of it is virtual nowadays anyway.2) What's more, you're tied to certain hardware, which, even if it can run under FreeBSD, isn't needed by the consumer.
I'm a contractor. I work for a company that specializes in "UNIX" engineers. I get send to different companies, to do projects or temporarily fill an employment gap. I get to go to all sorts of different companies, small, large and everything in between. I've done quite a bit of Sun Solaris but most companies nowadays have all mostly switched to Linux. Besides the typical Microsoft Windows office type environment (workstations, file/print servers, active directory, outlook/exchange, etc) of course. It's rarely a 100% Linux environment, it's often a 4 to 1 ratio (for every 4 MS Windows servers, there's 1 Linux server).
Yeah, that's pretty much what you see everywhere, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, etc. all getting replaced by Linux. And they usually pick RedHat, or at the very least settle on one specific distribution. Having to maintain dozens of different distributions is a nightmare.the product/solution that ran the customer's application was initially 100% HP-UX then moved to RedHat Linux 100%.
In that customer's case, it was a government agency and they were more comfortable having paid support. Of course we could have had a free solution but at that time, open source was only just starting to make inroads to the government and some agencies still thought it was "evil", wrongly so of course.Yeah, that's pretty much what you see everywhere, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, etc. all getting replaced by Linux. And they usually pick RedHat, or at the very least settle on one specific distribution. Having to maintain dozens of different distributions is a nightmare.
This was still happening as late as 2019 in government. I can't tell you how infuriating it is to not be able to install free software on a free operating system because it would violate your license. I guess they do it to enforce supported configurations, but it's still obnoxious.In that customer's case, it was a government agency and they were more comfortable having paid support. Of course we could have had a free solution but at that time, open source was only just starting to make inroads to the government and some agencies still thought it was "evil", wrongly so of course.
FreeBSD is not the only system I use...Is FreeBSD the only operating system you use? Tell me, what system do you use in dual boot with FreeBSD and why? Are you forced to use Linux distributions to make money? Could you be uncompromising and abandon systems other than FreeBSD?
Have you thought about refusing to use some feature if it's not supported by FreeBSD? For me, for example, such a [Feature] is CUDA/ROCM computing. I am faced with a choice: use Ubuntu, or refuse to compute using these libraries. But this is just an example in my case). I can easily set up Ubuntu (or Gentoo, for example) in an advanced style with a ZFS pull and other goodies, but these distributions don't seem quite as perfect as FreeBSD to me.
At home: The two servers (home and cloud-based) are FreeBSD. My laptop/desktops are all Macs. Other family members have a mix of Mac and Windows, depending on their requirements and use cases. For Raspberry Pis that are doing data acquisition and control, I use Linux (Raspbian -> Debian).Is FreeBSD the only operating system you use?
For my private box and netbook, FreeBSD is the only OS I use. I skipped dual boot with Windows something and Fedora 10 back in 2009. 'Do or Do Not, there is no Try'Is FreeBSD the only operating system you use?
There really isn't much to it other than what I already said.I'd be interested to learn a bit more about that. Would you mind if we take the conversation to PMs? (Or some other communication platform.)
My response would be to re-launch Outlook, reboot the machine, or use a different machine. Not like the boss cannot provide a different, brand-new machine at the drop of a hat.I'm glad to be only responsible for my FreeBSD box. Yesterday's upgrade to 13.2 just worked and was only triggered by me. No prior unanticipated drop in performance 'because an update was waiting' [/rant]
This morning however, the redmondisized boss box barfed again -- 'hard error'
Very Hard
View attachment 16223